The UN's latest Climate Change Conference recently concluded after two weeks of intense negotiations in Durban, South Africa. There's going to be a new agreement to address climate change, but does that really mean anything? Let's break down what happened.

And if you were hoping for an agreement that would lay down concrete steps to cut carbon emissions or lower global temperatures, then these talks were a dismal failure. Instead, they simply got all the countries there to agree to be part of a future, legally binding agreement that will be defined by 2015 and go into effect in 2020. That might just sound like passing the buck — and yeah, it kind of is — but this does represent some small progress from the Kyoto Protocol.

For one thing, this new agreement has the United States on board, which infamously refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Second, this future treaty will be legally binding for all countries, not just those classified as developed. While major developing powers like China and India ratified the Kyoto Protocol, they were under no real requirement to comply with it.

That should change with this new agreement, although a major contention of the final marathon 60-hour negotiating session was India's objection that their compliance not be "legally binding." They eventually settled on an agreement that would have "legal force." What's the difference? Your guess is as good as mine, though hopefully that will become clearer by 2015. It was also agreed to set up a fund to help developing countries pay for climate compliance, though there are no actual specifics on where the money would come from or how it would be managed.

Sponsored

So where do we stand? This is better than nothing, and the fact that the conference was extended by 36 hours just to get to this point suggests just how horribly difficult this process really is, and how quickly any minor progress could completely fall apart. Indeed, American officials reportedly thought this conference would end in failure, so even this minor success and modest commitment to future change has to be considered good news.

Admittedly, that's more a reflection of how bad the current situation is than anything else — we've got nowhere to go but up, and at least the world's most powerful governments are still trying, even if they're not accomplishing all that much. This, of course, is the most optimistic possible interpretation, because frankly I find the alternative is too depressing to contemplate — Greenpeace has already declared the talks a failure, and many smaller countries have criticized the major power brokers for not taking a stronger stance on cutting emissions.

Advertisement

Advertisement

We'll hopefully know a lot more about what the Durban talks really accomplished when the new treaty materializes in 2015 - and if no agreement arrives, which is unfortunately still a definite possibility, then we'll know how little these talks really mattered.

Additional Reading

This is a complex issue, and there's a lot of possible ways to read what happened in Durban. Here are some of the best ones, and we encourage you to check them out: